Philadelphia is home to the extraordinary Mütter Museum. Photograph: Corbis
Pathology in Philadelphia
This summer I managed to fulfil a long-term goal by visiting the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Although the College of Physicians of Philadelphia also has an exceptional medical library, I visited as a tourist rather than a professional historian of medicine, and went round their museum of anatomical specimens and other medical artifacts.
The banner outside claims the museum is 'Disturbingly Informative', and there's no doubt it relies in part on morbid curiosity to get people through the doors to see a fraction of its enormous collection of body parts (pickled, dried, and modelled in wax), surgical instruments and other paraphernalia from the history of medicine. The more extraordinary exhibits seem to get the most attention, such as the preserved foetuses in the teratology collection, the extremely tall and extremely short skeletons, the eight foot long megacolon, or the soap-lady.
The ethics of displaying human body parts are complicated; in the UK this practice is limited by the Human Tissue Act of 2004, brought in after the Alder Hay tissue retention scandal. This Act places restrictions on what can be displayed, particularly when it comes to bodies and bodies and parts taken from other countries, and has been the subject of a lot of (sometimes quite heated) debate and discussion. Many museums and charities now have careful and detailed rules and regulations about what can be shown. As an example, here is the Wellcome Trust's policy, which may sound restrictive but still allowed the Trust to borrow slices of Einstein's brain from the Mütter Museum and put them on display last year.
The people whose body parts end up in such museums were often the most vulnerable, the poor, the colonised, the disabled; but because the Mütter museum is laid out in an extremely old-fashioned form like nineteenth century anatomical and teaching displays, to me it felt much less like a freak show than it might have seemed if it was a more trendy, interactive museum. Whether it is 'disturbing' or 'informative' probably depends on the visitor – the signage is intelligent, and the special exhibitions were thought-provoking – but it is certainly not above criticism. Personally, exhibitions like this tend to remind me how the human body can be both incredibly vulnerable and amazingly resilient at the same time, and that some heart-breaking diseases remain without cure.
Making for the Mountains
If that's not exciting enough for you, how about climbing to the 'Top of Europe'? The Jungfrau may not be the highest mountain in the Alps, but it is home to the highest construction in Europe, the precarious looking Sphinx Observatory, which specialises in meteorology and solar spectography.
The Jungfrau is also the site of the highest railway station in Europe, which is good news for less energetic travellers (like me!) as we can get out onto the glacier and snowy slopes with minimal effort. Crucial equipment testing was done here for the British 1953 Everest Expedition; the testing team was still in the Jungfrau region when they received word that the Swiss expeditions of 1952 had failed, clearing the way for a British attempt the next year.
There are even more history of science connections on the nearby Faulhorn, where the hut established in 1823 soon evolved into a hotel, attracting metrologists, astronomers and even organic chemists doing nutritional research. And if, like all good science geeks you love trains, it's fairly easy to travel there from the UK entirely by rail.
A History of Science Travel Guide
If neither of those options appeal, you can always browse the British Society for the History of Science's online Travel Guide. This is an on-going project, so at the moment it's still a bit geographically limited (submission guidelines are here), but you can use the interactive world map to double check your next holiday destination and find out whether you'll be near a famous scientist's grave, the world's largest scale model of the solar system, or extraordinary cave paintings (but please don't ask me what train you need for Fairyland).
Alternatively, if this year's holiday has left you a bit strapped for cash, and you're considering a UK staycation, you might still be able to see a geological puzzle that fascinated Charles Darwin, a leper chapel, or even some dinosaurs.
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